Redalyc.¡Circulen! El Lenguaje De La Arquitectura En Circulación Y Como

ARQ ISSN: 0716-0852 [email protected] Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Chile Galán, Ignacio G. ¡Circulen! El lenguaje de la arquitectura en circulación y como instrumento para la circulación ARQ, núm. 96, agosto, 2017, pp. 134-149 Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Santiago, Chile Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=37552672014 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative GALÁN Palabras clave Metro Infraestructura Albini Tafuri Milán Keywords Subway Infrastructure Albini CirCulate! Tafuri Milano Architecture’s language in circulation and as an instrument for circulation1 FIG 1 Carlo Orsi. Although architecture seems to have Metropolitana Milanese. Milán / Milano, 1964. a minor role in the definition of urban © Carlo Orsi infrastructures, softening its roughness and aiding its functionality, the following contribution argues it can do more than that. The project for the Milano subway by Albini and Helg shows that architecture and design can also ground the role of infastructures as instruments of cultural coordination and social 134 articulation in the post-Fordist city. iGnACiO G. GA lán Term Assistant Professor Barnard+Columbia Colleges, New York, USA UC CHILE — ARQ 96 onsider the following image to begin: a C policeman (or perhaps a policewoman?), posing in a relaxed position (Fig. 1). She is framed horizontally by a continuous banner announcing a subway station –Duomo – and the edge of a platform, positioned at the top and the bottom of the photograph. Dressed in a light elegant white outfit, legs crossed and leaning on the stair rail, she is observed not only by the camera located on the opposite platform, but also, on the left- hand side of the image, by a group of six people turning their heads toward the figure in white. A colored tube rises from the wall turning upward, making a perfect quarter-circle arc to the left and then a full half-circle to the right to find the policewoman’s fist, before finally turning around the dark wall behind her back. There, before rising upstairs, the railing tube meets, in an optical coincidence, the tip of a gigantic arrow of an advertising board located on the background wall. On this white and well-illuminated board, the big arrow frames the rather austere logo of the department store La Rinascente, pointing to the stair that rises to the exit. Nothing stands out in this 1964 photograph of the then recently inaugurated Milano subway, taken by Carlo Orsi – the policewoman, the railing and the advertisement orchestrate a perfect choreography – together they state: ‘Circulate!’ On November 1st, 1964, the first line of the Milanese subway system had been inaugurated, with two trains running together from the Lotto to Sesto Morelli stations (F IGS. 2,3). Required funds for the development of the project were gathered through a bond issue that was open to Milano residents. The Milanese population was thus bound first economically in the hope of eventually being better connected spatially and ultimately becoming a more cohesive social body. Initial studies had depicted a congested tram system and, given the impossibility of either expanding the infrastructure in the existing width of the streets or broadening them – due to the historical value of the city center – the subway seemed to be the only alternative to private vehicular transportation. The average speed of circulation was, in fact, constantly decreasing due to growing and unsatisfied needs – affecting not only the quality of life in the city but also its economy.2 The subway project responded to postwar programs of social welfare as much as to the needs of market development in the booming economy of Northern Italy, an area that in the 1950s and 60s was achieving the level of organization of work and production of other industrialized countries. 135 GALÁN FIG 2 Franco Albini, Franca Helg and Bob Noorda. Diseño de las estaciones. Milán, 1964 / Subway design. Milano, 1964. © cSac Università di Parma. Sezione Fotografia, Archivio Cisventi Milanese architects Franco Albini and Franca Helg were commissioned with the design of the stations, including interior arrangements, furniture and signage, a project they developed with the collaboration of graphic designer Bob Noorda. An article published in Architectural Forum celebrated the fact that a group of significant designers had been commissioned for such a project, showing that “subways need not be sewers.”3 Italian design, and particularly that of Milano, had acquired a growing international recognition over the previous decades, and if a circulatory infrastructure was here acknowledged, a plethora of Milanese design objects and interior ensembles had already been widely circulated both in the media and in the market. Milano was a city in circulation. Albini was a relevant figure within these circulatory logics of Italian design, authoring tables and radio equipment that were very successful in furniture fairs and department stores already in the late 1930s. Also department store La Rinascente was not an alien guest 136 in the walls of the subway, as it had become central to design’s circulatory operations. The circulation of objects turned international at the time and bore a non- dismissible impact upon Italy’s peaking share of exports UC CHILE — (Rey, 1967). Design became key to the Italian economic miracle supporting, and not merely decorating, projects of reform such as that of the subway. Less enthusiastic was the analysis of the project by ARQ 96 the Roman historian Manfredo Tafuri, witness to the crises that followed the period of economic expansion. In his History of Italian Architecture, published in English in 1988, Tafuri mentioned this key intervention just in a couple of lines, signaling its “rarified elegance,” taken as an example of the “make-shift language” developed contemporaneously by Albini, among other Italian architects, “to protect themselves from the assault of problems they considered skeptically” (Tafuri, 1988:85). Albini and Helg’s project could be interpreted, in Tafuri’s framework, as a locus classicus of the architect’s limitations in the face of the establishment of ‘planning’ as an autonomous discipline (Tafuri, 1988:71-81). For Tafuri, the linguistic efforts of architects within the surfaces of the city remained completely detached from the structures of society, merely their ideological cover. However, beyond the framework offered by the Italian historian, the language of the subway’s design was integral to a series of contemporaneous environments, articulated to new urban practices and legal frameworks. And, as this article will discuss, the role of this language could not be reduced to that of representation – inextricable as these environments were to the affirmation of circulation. Even more, they were a main instrument bringing society together around a common statement of circulation as a defining constitutive practice. The abstractions of language and the city If the subway was to be instrumental in the development of the city, it seemed it would be so primarily at the level of planning and the constitution of Milanese society, at which Albini and Helg were not invited to participate. The subway was directly connected, if only coincidentally, with some of the key interventions that Albini had developed at an urban scale throughout his career, despite his lack of responsibility for its urban layout: his Quartiere Gabriele D’Annunzio of 1939 was less than a mile away from the Lotto station while his Quartiere Ettore Ponti of the same year was soon to be served by the second line of the subway.4 The subway infrastructure was supposed to articulate the relationship of the thriving center of Milano with different residential suburban developments such as those designed by Albini, as well as to connect the different train stations serving the expanding hinterland – all areas in need of being cohesively incorporated into the social and cultural life of the metropolis (Virgili et al, 1970; Buzzi, 1960). The increasing demand for such an articulation was the object of the Piano Intercomunale Regionale, a plan coordinating municipal and regional projects published in 1963 (Tintorini, 1963; De Carlo, 1963;1966; Cercelloni,1979). Different analyses had 137 identified not only the increasing commercial activity in the center, but also the high economic pressure in the area GALÁN due to the development of the numerous lots still vacant after the war bombings. The subway was the key for a plan that aimed to dispense such pressure in a process of decentralization that could transform the functional disequilibria between center and periphery (Bottoni, 1956). Although closely related to these urban processes, Albini and Helg’s design obliterated rather than acknowledged such disequilibria, carrying through the reformist agenda of the project with a comprehensive design that distilled – or rather abstracted – all differences within a modular system and a clear visual identity. Not only exterior conditions but also interior idiosyncratic elements were unified in a design that, following Vittorio Gregotti’s review of the project, was able to absorb “without losing its own identity, all the adjectivations of the successive elements” (Gregotti, 1972:333; 1982: 355). Both the subway’s layout and its design could be read as part of what has been called the modern “unitary city ideal,” one supported by an “integrated infrastructural ideal” – models that Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (2001:49) have suggested for the understanding of the role of infrastructures in the modern metropolis.5 Such an infrastructural model has been traced back in modern urban planning to Haussmann’s project for the ‘regularization’ of Paris between 1853 and 1870 or, even before, to the Napoleonic plan for Milano in 1803, similarly designed as infrastructural interventions that fostered circulation within the city, additionally supported by a strong unified image.

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